Survey: Holiday Forecast 2012

Consumers Plan to Spend Less on 2012 Holiday Shopping

This year's holiday shopping season will be a less-than-jolly affair for U.S. retailers according to new survey results by CreditDonkey.com. When asked if they planned to spend more or less on holiday shopping than last year, 50.7% of respondents said less, while 31.5% said more, and 17.8 percent are unsure.

Among those who plan to spend less this year, “shaky” job security and a desire to save money were the most common reasons cited for tighter budgets in CreditDonkey.com’s 2012 Holiday Shopping Survey.

On the bright side – at least for Internet retailers – 54.5% of respondents expect to spend more money this year on Cyber Monday. However, only 41% of respondents said they will take advantage of post-Thanksgiving sales on “Black Friday.” Of those shoppers, 59.5% plan to spend less that day than they did last year.

Given the steady but slow improvement in the U.S. economy compared to last year, we were surprised by the number of people planning to spend less money this holiday season. Even if all of the ‘undecided’ consumers increase their budgets and some of the ‘spend less’ respondents change their minds, a significant percentage of consumers will trim their holiday budgets in 2012.

In other survey results:

61% of those polled said they will use only cash to finance their holiday spending; 11.5% said they will use credit, and 25.4 percent planned to use both cash and credit.

Whatever their current budgets, we think many consumers are underestimating what they’ll actually spend. People may want to spend less than $300, but a substantial number will break those budgets once they get into the ‘spirit of the season’ or find ‘the perfect gift.’ By December 26th, we wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most consumers spent far more than $300.

From October 9 to October 23, 2012, CreditDonkey.com polled 1,125 Americans, age 18 and over, about their holiday shopping plans using multiple choice questions and short-answer questionnaires.

Editor's Note: Chart "How much do you plan to spend on the holidays this year" is a distribution of what respondents plan to spend. We illustrated the distribution and not a mean because, in our opinion, it provides a better illustration of what is happening, whereas mean can be skewed by outliers. For example, if one respondent is planning to buy a $20,000 car as a gift for christmas, that will skew the 40 other respondents who plan to spend $100 (in this example, the reported mean would be $585).

Charles Tran is the founder of CreditDonkey, a credit card comparison and financial education website. Write to Charles Tran at charles@creditdonkey.com. Our data-driven analysis has been recognized by major news outlets across the country and has helped young adults make savvy financial and lifestyle decisions. (read more)

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